Contested Landscapes in the Caribbean: Revisiting Colonial Representations of Indigenous Political Hierarchy, Borders and Movement

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

What we know today of the Indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean is the result of a process of cultural interpretation and representation originating from the colonial enterprise. For the island of Haytí, later renamed as Hispaniola by Columbus, the first Spanish chroniclers identified a set of indigenous territories that represented diverse indigenous political hierarchies and cultures. This identification has been repeated through the years, reified in textbooks and histories until it represented the "truth" about the indigenous past for the general public in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and even worldwide. Using regional surveys and extensive excavations throughout the northern Dominican Republic, the Nexus 1492 project has compiled a database of archaeological information that, provides enough data to critically reflect on the colonial representation of indigenous political hierarchies and to quantitatively explore how the archaeological record may contest or support this narrative. In this paper, we will confront these colonial representations with archaeological data and provide a new image of indigenous landscapes at the time of European invasion of the Caribbean. Most importantly, we will discuss how these results are being used to craft a dialogue with modern descendants of groups whose entire histories were selected, erased, and modified by colonizers.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24565